Ecosystem

Wolves, as you have undoubtedly heard, are once again thriving in Yellowstone. The 66 trapped in Canada and released in Yellowstone and the Idaho wilderness in 1995-96 have generated more than 1,700 wolves. To the delight of scientists and tourists — and the dismay of many ranchers — more than 200 wolf packs exist in the area today. Courts and government agencies are still sorting out how the wolves should be managed. But one thing is abundantly clear: The reintroduction has succeeded in ways that extend far beyond the health of the wolves themselves.

MEXICO CITY - Scientists who take the annual measure of Mexican forestland famously occupied by migrating monarch butterflies said Wednesday that the butterfly population is the smallest they have seen in two decades. The likely cause is unseasonably warm weather recently in the United States, as well as a dramatic loss of habitat in the U.S. Corn Belt, the scientists said. In a survey carried out in December and January, researchers found nine monarch colonies wintering in central Mexico, occupying a total of 1.19 hectares, or 2.94 acres, a 59% decrease compared with the previous year's study.

Wild animals and kids in the same park is not an ecosystem, it's an eatosystem. J.B. MOORE La Habra

BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE, Fla. - Strapped to Billy Bullard's hip was a machete he'd bought at a yard sale. In his fist were 4-foot-long metal snake tongs. Attached to the tongs was a high-resolution waterproof camera he called a "snake-cam. " All he had to do now was find a Burmese python. Bullard had been invited, along with just about anyone else willing to pay a $25 fee, to plunge into swampland and kill the fat, generally docile snakes that have been threatening the Everglades' ecosystem.

With more than 90% of California's flyway habitat wetlands destroyed, the Ormond Beach wetlands rise in significance as a natural homeland for wildfowl and an example of how nature fashions an ecosystem that is sustainable. The genius or inclination of man has never been sufficient to manufacture a reproduction of a workable ecosystem. Once it has been destroyed, any chance for future generations to study the ways of nature is lost forever. Any development that would hinder the viability of the Ormond Beach wetlands would be a tragedy for Oxnard and California.

The "unlikely foes"--conservationists and animal-rights activists--are frighteningly alike in their ignoring of raging overpopulation/world migration, the source of the accelerating devastation of our ecosystem. Sacred cows can never replace essential diversity. SUSU LEVY, President, Foundation for Optimal Planetary Survival, Encino

Workers at the Glen Canyon Dam are preparing to shut off bypass gates that have been pouring billions of extra gallons of water into the Colorado River for the past several days. The release created a flood in the Grand Canyon designed to mimic the natural ones that used to nourish the ecosystem by spreading sediment. The closing of the gates at the dam near the Utah-Arizona border is expected to be completed by this afternoon.

In his column "Seeing red over 'green scare' " (Opinion, April 20), Jonah Goldberg refers to "a host of new environmental scare books." In my quest for data on ecosystem changes, I found recent reports and summaries that scientifically document serious ecological changes in progress that require prompt rectification. They are responsible scientific findings of research groups, often several in collaboration. They don't have all the answers, but they warn against delaying action until more damage is done than can be rectified.

As a number of critics--even some in the environmental community--have pointed out, Hodel's notion of dismantling O'Shaughnessy Dam in order to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley to its original state in Yosemite National Park is fraught with practical and logistical problems. If the secretary is serious about wanting to add to Yosemite's beauty and grandeur as well as implementing Muir's original vision of the park, he would do well to seriously consider extending Yosemite's eastern border to include Mono Lake and its tributary streams.

George Will ("Moral Exhibitionism Takes a Rest," Commentary, April 15) tried to show us that we must balance our actions regarding the environment with their associated costs. He failed to balance his example of destroying wolves in Yellowstone and how this caused havoc with the ecosystem with his desire to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He states that we as an economy should go after the "most accessible oil" first to "avoid higher energy costs, slower economic growth [and]

Facebook Inc.'s initial public offering isn't just a flop on Wall Street. It's also not making waves in social gaming land. Facebook, whose popularity among its nearly 1 billion users has been partly fueled by social games published by Zynga Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and others, may be facing a collapse of its gaming ecosystem, according to a book released this week by P.J. McNealy, a media analyst with Digital World Research. "Early Days: The Social Gaming Market and Facebook's Achilles' Heel" argues that developers are no longer making as many Facebook games because it has become impossible for them to make money.

NEW YORK - Satellite broadcaster Dish Network Corp.'s new Auto Hop feature, which makes it easier for viewers to avoid watching commercials, is not winning the company any fans in the television business. Dish's new offering lets customers block commercials from recorded shows that have aired on broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox during the previous day. Although consumers with digital video recorders can already fast-forward through commercials of recorded shows, Auto Hop takes it a step further.

Alien species are invading Antarctica from as far away as the Arctic - and could fundamentally alter ecosystems in the world's last relatively untouched continent, an international team of scientists has reported. The risks from these biological interlopers - seeds and plant material carried in on the shoes and clothing of well-meaning scientists, ecotourists and support staff - will increase as the icy content continues to thaw because of climate change, the scientists reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

Coral reefs have been dying off at alarming rates because of modern human activity, and conservationists struggle to preserve them. Now scientists have found such efforts have a long history. By the beginning of the 15th century, native Hawaiian islanders were engaging in sustainable practices to preserve their reefs — ushering in 400 years of recovery. The research, published Monday in the journal PLoS One, shows that sustainable practices go back a long way and that coral reefs may be better able to regenerate than previously thought.

Facebook is relying on a fast-growing network of independent partners to build an advertising sector that some say may ultimately rival the network of companies that grew up in the last decade around Google's search revolution. Less than two years ago, there were widespread doubts about Facebook's viability as an advertising business, despite clear evidence of its runaway social popularity. But Facebook in 2011 has emerged as an online ad powerhouse, leading to speculation that the company's IPO could be worth more than $100 billion next year.

Aldo Leopold wrote: "The last word in ignorance is the man who says of a plant or animal, 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part of it is good, whether we understand it or not." The controversy surrounding the endangered gnatcatcher is not simply about the species, but survival of the "land mechanism" or, as we now call it, the ecosystem, which the species depends on and has come to represent. The gnatcatcher is only the more politically visible of a vast number of plants and critters that compose this now-fragmented ecosystem.

"City Is Losing a Part of Its Soul in Playa Vista" (Commentary, June 7) stated that environmentalists "are understandably grateful for a little more wetland, and grow silent when it comes to fighting on behalf of the Indians' cultural claims." In fact, the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust has sought to protect and restore the entire Ballona ecosystem to its natural, functioning form and to protect Native American burial sites since 1994. For the record, this organization does not support the developer's man-made creek across a Native American burial site.

Seventeen thousand feet above sea level, at the top of the Lake Titicaca basin in Peru, the gray-black slopes sparkle with tiny flakes of gold. Each day, 40,000 people with pickaxes and crude hydraulic drills work the shaft mines of La Rinconada. Another few thousand toil in teams sifting sand in an open pit mine at the headwaters of the lake's principal tributary. A gold rush is on in this part of the Andes. New fortunes are made by a few, while many others toil amid mass squalor.

State and federal authorities fanned out across six Northern California counties in recent weeks in a broad attack on marijuana farms in U.S. forests, officials said. More than 460,000 pot plants were destroyed and 101 people arrested in the raids in and around the Mendocino National Forest. The action came in response to a proliferation of marijuana farms that are destroying ecosystems and scaring hikers away, Melinda Haag, U.S. attorney for Northern California, said at a news conference announcing the operation Friday.